The Laughing Girl

1918. The Great War is bleeding Europe dry, and Michael O'Ryan has just inherited something absurd: a deserted chalet in the Swiss Alps, a curious red-headed maid named Thusis, and an ultimatum from local authorities that he must run the property as a hotel or forfeit it entirely. When his friend Smith arrives, he notices something uncanny: Thusis bears an uncanny resemblance to a photograph O'Ryan cherishes called 'The Laughing Girl.' What begins as a bemused encounter with bureaucratic absurdity becomes something stranger and more profound, as O'Ryan grapples with questions of identity, inheritance, and the ways strangers can remake us. Set against the backdrop of a world at war, this strange, gentle novel finds humor and beauty in the absurd structures we build around ourselves, and asks what it means to inherit a life when the world has been turned inside out.